‘Yes, maybe a little,’ and he too leaned forward and laid one hand flat on the ground and swung himself down into the trench and landed with a thud on his bent knees. It hadn’t been raining but the sides were moist with dew. If you ran your hand along the edges little stones and gravel stuck to your palms.
‘Well, let’s get going then,’ Tommy said.
‘Definitely,’ Jim said. And Tommy took the nearest pickaxe and with his legs apart he stood facing the end of the trench and from high in the air above his shoulder he struck out with the flat side of the pickaxe and Jim took a claw and stood at the ready, and Tommy swung the pickaxe into the side, as high as he could the first time, and at once the soil and stones tumbled into the bottom of the trench and piled up between his legs. And then he swung a second time, and a third, and the soil and stones kept falling, and he hacked at the side all the way down to the bottom, and there was a landslide of gravel and small stones and bigger, and they rolled between Tommy’s legs and piled up, and he just kept going. After ten or eleven swings of the pickaxe there was already a good pile between Tommy’s legs, and Jim stood a couple of steps behind him, so the pickaxe wouldn’t hit him in the head. But as soon as Tommy stopped to rest, Jim came with the claw and scraped the rubble towards him in long sweeps, away from Tommy so that Tommy had space for his legs, and Jim raked all of it away and scraped the ground clean and level along the sides so that nothing was left, and there was the same flat bottom here as in the rest of the trench, it looked so good. Then they both grabbed a spade, and from opposite ends they attacked the large heap they had collected and tossed the soil and the gravel and the stones up over the edge, each to their own side: Tommy to the north and Jim to the south, and as the trench was quite deep, they had to go at it hard, and soon they were exhausted. But still they kept going, and gradually as they were hacking and shovelling away the rhythm of it was easier to find, the sensible solution already existed, hidden in the work, in those specific movements, and was only waiting to reveal itself, and waiting for their hands and arms. And they felt it coming and moved towards it and fell into it and let their bodies swing for every stroke, first the tip of the spade into the pile and then a step back and a quarter-turn with their arms rising until the spade was over the edge where it stopped and sent the mass flying, and the spade did half the job with its own weight and speed, and their hips did their part of the job, and the knowledge of this came from the work itself and not from any particular place in the brain that stored these things from the day you were born, and every spadeful and every swivel of the hips balanced the load between each part of the body, and no one part did the job alone, and the body did not even want to stop.
‘Are you OK,’ Tommy said. ‘Can you do it,’ he said and Jim said:
‘Sure, I can, if you can,’ and Tommy laughed and said:
‘Hell, this is just such fun.’ And then he said: ‘Are there any lights on in the windows.’ Jim stood up and looked to both sides and then down the road, but all the windows were dark, only the line of outside lamps was lit.
‘All dark,’ he said. ‘The windows anyway.’
‘Perfect,’ Tommy said, and started hacking again, and there was another landslide of soil and gravel, and the stones slid down between his legs, and he kept on and on and swung his pickaxe and didn’t want to stop, and his hips yielded and straightened up again, they yielded and straightened up, as though he had ball bearings inside them, and they yielded and straightened up, and the gravel was streaming down between his legs after every swing and the stones came tumbling, and his hips yielded and straightened up, and Jim came behind him with the claw and scraped the pile towards him in long, greedy lunges until it was heaped up in a good mound, and he used his arms, and his shoulders too, and his back he used and raked the trench clean and flat to the walls, and with their spades they tossed the gravel high up over the edges, and the spades were down into the gravel before the last load had landed, yes, that’s how fast they were working, and suddenly Jim stood up and said:
‘We could sing like the phone company men do.’
‘Don’t stop,’ Tommy said, ‘we’ll get all stiff,’ and Jim bent down and thrust the spade into the gravel, and shovelling the gravel and stones, he said:
‘Yes, but it would be pretty good.’
‘We might wake someone up.’
‘We don’t need to sing that loud, just enough to help us with the digging. I mean, we’re down in a trench. No one will hear us anyway.’
‘OK. Why not. It has to be one that really fits, though,’ Tommy said, ‘or else it’ll just be a shambles, and we’ll lose the rhythm and get tired,’ and they thought hard as they hurled the gravel over the edge, and their hips swung back, and they thrust down the spades, and full of gravel and soil, they let it fly in even higher arcs, all the time wondering which song that might fit. They tried several Beatles songs and one by the Hollies, but they couldn’t get the rhythm right, and then they lost the beat, and Tommy said:
‘It won’t work. It’ll just be a shambles.’
‘Yes, maybe it will,’ Jim said, and then he said: ‘But listen to this one.’ And he began to sing:
Where’er you walk on hill and fell
A winter’s day, a summer’s night
and thrust the spade into the gravel, and swivelling round with the spade at knee height, he tossed the gravel out of the trench, up over the edge, and it worked and the rhythm was perfect if you didn’t sing too fast, and Tommy said:
‘No, no, we can’t sing a national anthem, it’s embarrassing, what if someone heard us.’
‘No one will hear us,’ Jim said. ‘We’ll be singing inside the trench,’ and they did. Down in the trench they sang ‘Norway in red, white and blue’ in very low voices, but still loud enough, and eventually it did help them with the rhythm, as soon as they had lost their embarrassment.
And then they were exhausted. They couldn’t lift another spadeful, they couldn’t lift a pickaxe. Their knees trembled so much it was hard to stand upright without leaning against something. They clambered out of the trench and sat on the edge with their legs dangling, inspecting the work they had done. Their breath came in quick, stuttering bursts, and all around them it was light, but no one was outside on the doorstep yet, no one had heard them singing. The light was on in Sletten’s kitchen. Jim picked up his pouch and rolled a cigarette. His hands shook, but for some reason this time he could do it, and he lit up and inhaled the smoke as deep as he could and then exhaled and smiled. They looked at each other, and Tommy said:
‘If I were a smoker, I would have smoked right now. You seem so damn pleased.’
Jim laughed.
‘So, how far did we get,’ he said.
‘Let’s see now.’ Tommy got up stiffly. ‘Oh, shit, am I stiff, or what,’ he said, almost struggling to the place where the telephone company men had stopped working the day before, where Jim and Tommy had taken over, and he paced the distance between that point and the point where the two of them had finished digging only minutes before.
‘About five metres,’ he said. ‘Not less than that,’ and it may not sound a lot, but it was, and Tommy was proud and said: ‘Not bad. We’re working heroes. We should be given medals.’ And Jim said:
‘In the Soviet Union the workers were given medals if they had worked really hard. In the 1930s at least, they got their medals. The best were given prizes. The Stakhanov Prize, it was called. It was a big deal.’
‘How do you know that.’
‘I know a lot of stuff.’
‘That’s true. You do. But we’re against the Soviet Union, aren’t we. After what happened two years ago.’
‘Definitely,’ Jim said.
‘Well, then we don’t give a shit about those medals,’ Tommy said. ‘We can do without them.’
Suddenly they heard the drone of a diesel engine down the road. Jim looked at his watch and got up and threw the cigarette butt into the trench and said:
‘Tommy, we’re off,’ and Tommy got to his feet and they were out of there before the the truck with the workers came round the bend. They walked in behind Sletten’s house and down along the row of houses at the back, where the living rooms were, and the woodsheds, and a greenhouse was there with every third pane of glass smashed in its frame, and no one was in their living room on this side of the house, at this time of day, now all those who were up were in the kitchen at the front. So the two of them walked with the houses and the kitchen gardens on their left and the dip on the right, and across the field they saw Birkelunden and the pond where Lobo had almost drowned. He was dead now. The vet came out from Mørk to give him an injection. Jesus, he said, we’ll have to let him go, this has gone too far, this, too long, I should have come out before, and he did have a point, for Lobo couldn’t walk any more, he could barely stand upright when he ate. So there was no way round it. But this was several years ago now.
‘Do you remember Lobo,’ Jim said.
‘Of course I do,’ Tommy said.
‘I remember you saved him from drowning in the Bjørkerud Pond. Everyone talked about it afterwards. Your mother was there, wasn’t she. People wondered why she didn’t save him. Why you had to.’
‘My mother couldn’t swim.’
‘But grown-ups can touch the bottom there.’
‘I know,’ Tommy said.
‘You were only ten years old. You couldn’t touch the bottom, you had to swim.’
‘I know,’ Tommy said.
‘I know you know. I’ll keep my mouth shut.’
‘No it’s fine,’ Tommy said.
Now they had almost reached the end of the row, and it wasn’t something they had planned to do, to go there, they had been at Willy’s party, that was all, and then all of a sudden they were standing by the house that once had been the Berggrens’ house, at the back, and the windows were still boarded up with the same boards the carpenter had used that day, the man who had a yellow hammer painted on his red van. As far as they knew, no one had even touched the door handle since. It wasn’t that far from Jonsen’s house, some hundred metres only, but Tommy hadn’t been there, hadn’t walked past the Berggren house for four years. He could see it through the window from his seat in the school bus, but he always looked away as they went past.
From the edge of the field they forced their way through the ragged bushes on to the flagstones behind the Berggrens’ house. The old chair Tommy’s father used to sit on and smoke was still in the same place, but you didn’t feel like sitting there now. They walked over to the windows. The boards had started to rot and crack and loosen around the nail heads. They were lousy boards. Tommy started to pull at one of them. No one could see them on this side, there was no one outside back here but the two of them and a quiet mist above the field and the dip and Birkelunden, and you couldn’t see the pond. They could easily hear the diesel engine at the other end of the neighbourhood, but it no longer had anything to do with them. It hardly occurred to them what the telephone company people might say when they arrived and saw what had happened while they were at home in their beds. But the trenches were already in the past, they didn’t think about them. And Tommy pulled hard at one board and the nails came loose and he was suddenly flying backwards with the board in his hands and almost fell over. He threw it away and walked back and pulled another one right off the window, and then another one, and it wasn’t difficult at all.
‘Goddamn, what shitty boards,’ he said. ‘That carpenter may have been a communist, but he was stingy, that’s for sure.’ The carpenter had been around in Mørk for two years, and then he was gone. Everybody said he was a communist, so they didn’t give him much to do, but he probably wasn’t. A communist. He just refused to paint his van a different colour.
A couple more boards, then the window was bare. They leaned forward. It wasn’t easy to see through the dirty glass because the sun was rising in the east, and they were at the back of the house in the west, but it wasn’t really dark. Not now. Everything in there was as it had been. It was four years ago, but it felt a lot longer. They were not the same people. Tommy wasn’t. All kinds of things had happened. Time had happened. He was thirteen years old then, he was seventeen now, going on eighteen. They were the longest years in the world. He didn’t know what to think, but he knew it was not by accident they were standing there, that he would have come here in the end, and even might have yearned to come, and when he did, it would do something to him, that he would look through the windows, as he was doing now, and see something he could take with him into his future life, something important he had not understood until exactly that moment, if he waited long enough and didn’t come here too early. He leaned forward with his forehead against the glass, and Jim did as he did, and for a minute or more they stood like that without speaking, looking in, and then Jim said:
‘It looks like the inside of a doll’s house.’
That was an odd thing to say. But it was true. Tommy saw it at once. Everything was pitch perfect inside in an almost surreal way, untouched, untouchable, everything in its right place. The chairs at the right angle before the TV. The pile of folded newspapers neatly stacked, corner to corner on the coffee table. Everything clean under the dust. The few pictures on the wall level with each other. The Zane Grey novels lined up on the shelf, not one book a millimetre out, as though the spines had been bought all in one piece and placed there to impress. They had been so meticulous about everything. Not a piece of clothing tossed on the floor, not a toy in a corner, not a ball. Everything meant to be as it had not been. It was meant to look like a home. The home of Tommy, Siri and the twins, two big children and the two small, and if anyone came to their house, they would soon see that everything was under control, that there was no need to call anyone, not the police, not child welfare, a little family was living here and they could manage on their own, and then they would be left in peace. Tommy, Siri and the twins. But now it was so easy to see that they had absolutely no idea what they were doing then, for Jim was right. It didn’t look like a home. It looked like the inside of a doll’s house.